Baslinux mailing list

[Samual Acorn <sam.acorn AT gmail.com>]

*gets the WD-40 out*

heres a quote from that page;
"Using zImage instead of bzImage avoids the problem (since zImage is
not loaded high)"

renaming the file wont change anything... if its compressed it must be
decompressed (loadlin detects the compression... AFAIK the naming of
the file is for convenience only) .... and since there is only 640k of
low mem that means it gets decompressed into high memory.... and in
order to (properly) load anything beyond the 1MB barrier A20 must be
turned on...

(zimages can only be made as big as ~500k because anything bigger wont
fit into low memory... )

so why does basic linux suffer? my theory is that the problem is not
with loadlin but DOS... DOS 7 will load himem.sys regardless if it is
in config.sys or not... IIRC himem.sys turns A20 on.... so with A20
already on.. running loadlin just adds to any problems that may be
there since it might try to turn it on... or see if its on.... and
ceartain methods of checking if its on will turn it off (or viceversa)
or cause other hardware... like the trident card... to get messed
up...

a trick; format a floppy and 'sys' dos to it... delete command.com
from that floppy and make a config.sys with a single line in it;

SHELL="loadlin ........." (where .... is loadlins paramiters)

you can of course keep baslin on the harddrive... just change the
loadlin parameters to point to where the kernel and root filesystems
are.... that way you have a clean DOS that only booted to real
mode.... letting loadlin and linux do whatever they wish with A20 and
the system memory...  this would of course only be a temorary "see if
it fixes the problem" type of thing...

btw, bigger kernels also have better support for broken hardware...
that is... if they are loaded properly...

YMMV

On 22/12/05, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> It says to avoid a certain hardware problem by using zImage instead of
> bzImage.  But if the kernel is over a certain size (around 500K?) you
> are not allowed to make a zImage, only a bzImage.  I have been renaming my
> bzImages to zimage and loadlin works anyway.  Are these gzipped and
> bzipped files that loadlin can detect without .gz or .bz2 ?
>
>
> On Thu, 22 Dec 2005, Samual Acorn wrote:
>
> > playing around with lowlevel hardware access in windoze 2k (yes i know
> > its a no no... but i like playing) i had problems getting a ceartain
> > programs timing to work properly... would slow waaaay down till i hit
> > a key (any key)... then "0x60" flew out of a rather rusty part of my
> > brain... fixed my problem and lead me to search for what all (if
> > anything other than the keyboard) is at 0x60 and i came across a
> > rather interesting page... might be of some use;
> >
> > http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/A20.html
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > --sam
> > http://mephitus.renamon.org/
> > "When you've done something right, no one will be sure you've done
> > anything at all." -- Futurama
> > --
> > _______________________________________________
> > BasLinux mailing list
> > BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux
> >
>
> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux
>


--
--sam
http://mephitus.renamon.org/
"When you've done something right, no one will be sure you've done
anything at all." -- Futurama
--